Original Vista was crap, since the updates to it, its been extremely reliable. Windows 7 is a little faster to boot up, but other than that, once in use I dont really see much difference between the two in terms of performance.

XP as Vista is really really painful and will proably choke your pc. Get Windows 7 if you can.
Dont go near Vista its the work of the Devil. It was never really adopte in the enterprise as it was 5h1t.

Mainly due to groundless fearmongering nonsense like that.
The initial releases were a disappointment but there really isn’t much wrong with Vista these days.
It hasn’t “choked up” my PC despite it being a circa 2005 dual core AMD.

Windows 7 is practically identical to Vista, but it managed to avoid the Vista stigma.

Sorry Graham not fear mongering just an opinion, I also work in IT and never rolled out Vista because it was shit. It may be OK now its all lovely and patched etc but we have Windows 7. When we had XP or Vist nobody went Vista because it was shit. Then Windows 7 came out quite quickly in the software lifecucle, bacause Vista was shit.

2+ years after Windows 7 is released Vista works, brilliant, bit late though!

Google “Mojave experiment” – nice videos where Microsoft showed people an unbranded Vista and told them it was a new OS they were working on. They got positive responses, even from people who thought it “looks much better than Vista”.

Can you define what exactly was s**t about Vista?

I’ve had family and usually not-interested-in-tech friends tell me this, but none of them could tell me why.

As I recall the two biggest complaints were the new User Account Control (better for security, common in other OS, easily disabled and appeared far less after the first service pack) and the old “Vista is resource hungry because it uses all my memory” misconception (it grabs unused memory for caches and hands it back if required – why would you want memory sat there doing nothing?)

Windows 7 came out quite quickly in the software lifecucle, bacause Vista was shit.

Vista was perfectly usable from Service Pack 1, but Win 7 got rushed out because Microsoft knew Vista had been irrevocably damaged by bad press and FUD, as the Mojave Experiment shows.

Wot GrahamS says. Vista=rubbish is just another internet meme repeated by those who lack the knowledge but like to appear clever.

This. I run Vista64 on an old first-gen quad-core with 8GB RAM. It’s still the same install that the PC came with (i.e. never needed to reformat etc) and it’s still fine. Certainly no slower than any other OS after 5 years without being wiped (and therefore full of odds and ends of 5 year’s worth of poorly patched drivers, fragments of programs etc).

I’m sure if I reinstalled fresh with Vista or 7 I wouldn’t notice the difference. Anything with more than 4GB ram avoid XP as XP_64 never really took off and isn’t supported by a lot of software any more.

x64 allows you to access more memory including the inaccessible chunk in a 4 GB system. However, it requires more. It’s a fallacy to assume that you “need” x64 with 4 GB, it’s usually better to take the hit and stick with 32 bit.

Fair point Cougar, but x64 also lifts the per-process limit, which is 2GB on a 32-bit system.
If you are editing large files under a single process (e.g. image or video editing) then that can make a pretty big difference (IME).